PNY CS1311 SSD Review

Real-World Software Performance

PCMark 8 Real-World Software Performance

For details on our real-world software performance testing, please click here.

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It's difficult for most of us to derive meaning from IOPS, but we all understand time. And getting a time-based benchmark result from software we're all familiar with is even better. If you already have an SSD in your system, then these results should come close to what you see now. But anyone with a mechanical hard drive will appreciate the difference, since disk-based storage often takes twice as long to load basic applications compared to entry-level SSDs.

You can see in the results below that drives are sometimes separated by tenths of a second, which doesn't seem like much.

But the story changes when you look at the throughput of all applications combined and averaged together. The CS1311 SSDs manage to land in the middle of our hierarchy. They're both faster than OCZ's Trion 150 and Crucial's BX200, but can't match Adata's 480GB SP550.

PCMark 8 Advanced Workload Performance

To learn how we test advanced workload performance, please click here.

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The PCMark 8 Storage Test operates with very little data on the drive. Performance changes when an SSD is full or nearly full, though. This set of measurements involves lots of data monopolizing the flash. When it comes to entry-level SSDs, we only look at the test's recovery stages. The degrade and steady state stages are more indicative of workstation-class loads, and they fall outside of what you'll see in a mainstream PC.

Phison's S10 controller is an eight-core processor with the resources to dedicate to background activities like garbage collection and wear-leveling. When its associated NAND is almost full, the extra cores help maintain performance. This test uses a five-minute think time (pause in reads and writes), which seems to be enough for the SLC buffer to purge data to the triple-level-cell flash.

Total Access Time

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Waiting on storage just doesn't feel right when you have an SSD under the hood. These tests continue to run on an almost full drive, though now we're reporting access times, which is essentially the latency from the combined tests.

PNY's CS1311s perform well under these conditions. This is one of the first entry-level SSD families able to compete against Samsung's 500GB 850 EVO during the test's recovery stage. 

Notebook Battery Life

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They don't, however, fare as well here, just like PNY's CS2211 XLR8 SSDs with Toshiba 15nm MLC flash. Three of the four PNY drives we've tested recently deliver 597 minutes of battery life in BAPCo's MobileMark 2012 software., while the top finisher approaches 700 minutes. This result isn't a deal-breaker, per se, but there are SSDs that facilitate better battery life, though.